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A/B Testing is a critical component of any online marketing strategy that relies on high user growth. Whether you are testing email subject lines, ad copy or landing page imagery, the important thing to remember is to test and refine constantly.

Landing Page Conversions

At SkillPages, A/B testing is a central part to acquisition. This process is an iterative one, where testing and refining on an on-going basis is vital. An essential part of our user growth strategy is to ensure that as many of the people that visit our site, whether it’s through search engines, email or anywhere else, actually convert to a registered member. If the conversion rate of our landing page increases, our CPA decreases so it’s a win-win.

What drives conversion rate improvement?

An elementary mistake too many marketers make is to change landing pages based on intuition and gut. The only thing that can inform our decisions on landing page changes is reliable data. We have found, through ongoing testing, that the primary contributors to landing page improvements are:

Relevance

Value Proposition

Trust

Clear Call To Action

Testing And Refining

Persistence with testing and refining, over and over again, pays off. Here is an example of how A/B testing one of our landing pages has resulted in a 30% increase in conversions over a 3 week period!

The purpose of this particular landing page was to convert photographers to join SkillPages. Our first landing page was developed based on analyzing best practice for landing page conversions. We had 3 key components that we felt were strong motivators for converting visitors – a strong headline, sub headline and main call to action copy. But you don’t know how your audience will best react to all these elements until you start testing.

After initial tests we quickly added two more components into the mix and ended up with 5 main components to focus on for iteration.

Headline

Sub Headline

Images

Benefits Copy

Call To Action Copy

These 5 components were prioritized in order of importance and a testing plan was devised. Each item on the list was tested in succession. Our key strategy is to test each component in isolation and leave the rest of the page unchanged so we can accurately and confidently say what has triggered the increase or decrease in conversions.

Each test involved split testing traffic, where 50% of the traffic was directed to the control version of the page(version A) and the other 50% directed to the test page(version B). Based on the test result we would either continue with our original component or adopt the test data as the new component, depending on which was the better performing of course. Each subsequent item on our list was tested and iterated until we ended up with the final version that was out performing the original by 30%.

The secret to improving the conversion rate of your landing pages is to continuously test and refine. Until you reach that magic 100% conversion there is always room for improvement. Be patient and be persistent!